Brands that shape culture

25 years experience in using smart technologies to inspire better methodologies to drive better insight and an obsession to move research forward and not protect the past. A proven builder of businesses, having launched and grown an office of a Hall & Partners, and then started and grown his own business too.

Culture has always reflected the relationship between people and brands, with brands finding inventive ways to stay culturally relevant. But more recently brands have started to shape culture.

These ‘culture brands’ have a mission beyond themselves: they’re looking to champion a societal need, change a social attitude or behaviour, and make the world a better place. For brands to succeed, it’s no longer simply enough to communicate what the brand does; also, and more importantly, it must convey what it stands for, it’s values and what it calls us all to do.

Many companies have recently looked to define their purpose as a way of stretching beyond their own needs, and combining this with doing good in the world. Now brands have taken on this mantle, whether it be challenging female stereotyping, standing up for workers’ rights or creating a new vision of balance in health and wellness.

Our inventive projects rely on ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’. People show us how they experience the world and brands. The result is fresh profound truths. It provides a real-time window to people’s lives. Instead of analysing people’s behaviour by reflecting what they ‘think’ they did, we analyse what they actually did. Instead of telling us after the event, they show us during it.

Mobile has embraced people’s love of taking photos, and empowered them to share images instantly and in unprecedented numbers. Visual content has become – through technology – a key indicator of people’s loves, hates, aspirations, experiences and, sometimes, fears.

Photography is, more than ever, becoming the story of people’s lives. Not the story of what was but what is. Not what they once cared about but what they care about now.

Culture is something you sense unconsciously from everything around you. We’re moving away from research methods that are out of context, reflective and framed by our language, not theirs.

We’ve found four major advantages in putting culture at the heart of our understanding of brands: